Nuri Kamal al-Maliki

Early Life and Rise to Power

The dirt streets and the crumbling brick houses of Janajuh, Mr. Maliki's home village, are a reminder of how far he has come. Lying along a muddy irrigation canal between the southern cities of Karbala and Hilla, it has one relatively new building, a school, but everything else is simple brick weathered gray by the mud of winter and the dust of summer. The streets are barely wide enough to accommodate cars, and the traffic more often consists of women leading donkeys hauling hay and firewood.

Mr. Maliki was born in 1950, the son of a government employee and the grandson of a former education minister during the monarchy. By the time he was an adolescent he was bicycling along the gravel roads to Hindiya, the nearest town of any size, to go to school, said Shaker Jabber Abdul Hussain al Maliki, a cousin who still lives in Janajuh.

He joined the Dawa Party in college. At the time, the Islamist party, founded by an uncle of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, was already largely underground. Saddam Hussein saw its religious philosophy and predominantly Shiite membership as a threat. In 1979, shortly after he seized power, Mr. Hussein ordered the arrests of all Dawa Party members nationwide. In Mr. Maliki's home district alone, at least 70 men were detained; most were never seen again.

Mr. Maliki was one of fewer than five who escaped. He took refuge in Syria, moved to Iran and then returned to Syria.

While Shiite Islamist parties like Dawa are often accused of being close to Iran, Mr. Maliki saw the Iranians as neighbors but not always friends, his associates said. Dawa's exiles were treated as "unwelcome guests" in Iran, said Sami Alaskary, a member of Parliament and a close friend of the prime minister.

He recalled one occasion when Mr. Maliki sought permission from the Iranians to send a Dawa operative across the border to Iraq. After Mr. Maliki had waited for weeks, an Iranian official called to say that the answer was ready but that Mr. Maliki needed to pick it up at the border office. It was winter and bitter cold, but he made the 14-hour drive there. When he arrived, the paper said: "Permission denied." "That person who called him to tell him the answer was ready, he knew it was a rejection but he didn't tell him; he did it to humiliate him," Mr. Alaskary said.

Mr. Maliki did not return to Iraq until the American-led invasion of 2003.

Selection as Prime Minister

When Mr. Maliki was chosen as prime minister in April 2006, he was not a familiar figure to the general public, and he appeared stiff and nervous in his first press conference. He had served as a deputy leader in the Dawa Party and was picked only after months of wrangling in which Kurdish and Sunni officials combined to block the renomination of the interim prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Dawa leader.

Mr. Jaafari had earned a reputation as being indecisive, and had angered Kurdish and Sunni leaders by seeming to favor Shiite interests too much. Mr. Maliki's reputation was as someone more direct and forceful, and he stressed during his initial appearance a determination not to favor his sect above others.

But the key votes in the caucus of Shiite parties that chose him to be Mr. Jaafari's successor were cast by Mr. Sadr, who thereby thwarted the ambitions of his longtime rival, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the political party now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

As 2006 dragged bloodily on, American commanders expressed frustration with Mr. Maliki, saying that he appeared to be protecting the Mahdi Army and other militias. Mr. Maliki, for his part, lashed out at American attempts to force him to commit himself to a timetable for progress on an American-dictated set of benchmarks.

In January 2007, Mr. Maliki and Mr. Bush appeared to reach an understanding that allowed for the American president to proceed with an increase in combat troops, and American commanders reported less interference from the government. Over the course of the spring, Mr. Maliki weathered a boycott of his government by Mr. Sadr's party, who protested his cooperation with the U.S., and open maneuvering by Mr. Hakim to form a new government in an alliance with Kurds and moderate Sunnis. Eventually, Mr. Maliki and Mr. Hakim appeared to reach an understanding, although one that has frayed regularly. 

Asserting His Power

If any single moment can be said to have been the turning point for Mr. Maliki, it was one that appeared at first to be a disaster: his decision in March 2008 to order the Iraqi army into Basra, the southern Shiite city that was a stronghold of Moktada al-Sadr, the radical cleric who had been Mr. Maliki's biggest supporter before becoming an ardent foe. The assault, launched with no warning to the American military, faltered in embarrassing fashion, with many officers deserting in the face of fire from the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to Mr. Sadr. Iran stepped in and brokered a cease-fire that appeared to be on Mr. Sadr's terms. But in the weeks that followed the army took firm control of Basra.

Mr. Maliki followed up with an offensive to take control of Sadr City in Baghdad, the huge slum that had been Mr. Sadr's stronghold, and pushed it through weeks of bloody, door-to-door fighting. Facing a determined Iraqi Army backed by American troops and air power, Mr. Sadr struck a deal that allowed the government forces to take control of what had been his state-within-a-state, handing Mr. Maliki the biggest victory of his term.

After that, Mr. Maliki consolidated his power by reshuffling military commanders and creating two handpicked military forces that report primarily to him as the commander in chief rather than to the Interior or Defense Ministries. He also created tribal councils across the country that are directly linked to his office, which critics feared were stalking-horses to extend the reach of the Dawa Party.

At the same time, Mr. Maliki struggled to meet milestones for progress on political reconciliation set out by the U.S. government. American officials, while still backing him in disputes with other parties, criticized his government as corrupt and inefficient. Mr. Maliki responded by asserting his independence, first by supporting a timeline for the withdrawal of American troops that was close to that advocated by Barack Obama as a presidential candidate, and then by forcing Mr. Bush to make significant concessions in return for a Status of Forces agreement that would allow U.S. forces to remain in the country after the end of 2008.

As the June 30, 2009, deadline for the withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq's cities approached, Mr. Maliki called the move a "great victory," a repulsion of foreign occupiers he compared to the rebellion against British troops in 1920.

The anger at Mr. Maliki from the political class has been strong enough that he has twice narrowly missed being voted out of office, in December 2008 and in late 2007. He survived both efforts with American support, primarily because his opponents could not agree on a replacement. His actions have been more popular with the public at large: in provincial elections held in February 2009, his Dawa party emerged as the clear winner.

The 2010 Campaign

Mr. Maliki, an outwardly dour man with a jowly face darkened by a perpetual shadow of a beard, makes a simple case for re-election. He has repeated it over and over during his campaign. "Today's Iraq, dear brothers, is not the Iraq of 2005 or 2006" was how he put it at one rally in Baghdad, referring to the horrific sectarian bloodshed that very nearly devoured the country. It is both a boast of what his government has accomplished (with American help he rarely acknowledges) and a warning of what could return (when the Americans leave).

Mr. Maliki is neither a charismatic leader nor a polished campaigner, but in a country recently convulsed by chaos and carnage, his message and achievements have resonance, even among his critics.

He refashioned the Dawa party into a coalition he called State of Law, with a campaign that promised security and order, and played down his party's Shiite religious roots. But his strategy of building a grand political coalition representing all of Iraq's sects and ethnicities was co-opted by most of his challengers — with better success, arguably, in the case of a coalition led by a former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, a Shiite who has assembled the strongest cadre of Sunni parties behind him.

As the incumbent, Mr. Maliki has also been hampered by the shortcomings of his government: the lack of development and jobs, grinding poverty, corruption and feeble services, which confront Iraqis every day. Others attribute Mr. Maliki's diminished standing to a series of moves that have raised doubts about his respect for the country's balance of power.

And the Kremlin-like opacity of his decision-making — his own evident paranoia, sharpened by years in exile during Saddam Hussein's rule — have made some of his decisions appear capricious and contradictory.

A Shiite-led vilification of the Baath Party, which resulted in the surprise disqualification of scores of candidates in February, prompted Mr. Maliki to intensify his own statements to rally the Shiite votes he needs, even as it alienated the Sunnis he had once hoped to win over by appealing to a national Iraqi identity.

When an appeals court initially reversed the disqualifications, Mr. Maliki denounced the ruling as illegal. Then two days later he reversed himself after meeting with the country's top judge, in what was criticized as inappropriate interference.

Election and Aftermath

The nationwide parliamentary elections on March 7 went relatively smoothly, if smoothly can include a wave of violence meant to disrupt the vote, with 100 attacks in Baghdad alone. At least 38 people died, but the turnout was higher than expected. Sunnis who largely boycotted previous elections voted in force, and an intense competition for Shiite votes drove up participation in Baghdad and the south.

The results laid the ground work for a potentially sharp and divisive shift in power, with the coalition led by Mr. Allawi taking a slim lead, with 91 seats to Mr. Maliki's 89. Old alliances appeared to fracture against a surge of dissident movements. Traditional Kurdish and Shiite Arab alliances were confronted with movements that contested their claims to leadership, in particular the followers of the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who fought the Americans twice in 2004. Sunni Arab voters were newly emboldened in an election in which they forcefully took part under the banner of a secular alliance.

In many ways, the vote solidified ethnic and sectarian divisions unleashed by the American-led invasion in 2003. Despite a conscious effort by most parties to appeal to nationalist sentiments, people still voted along the lines of identity. Those demarcations of Sunni Arab, Shiite Arab or Kurd have bedeviled attempts to solve the country's most pressing issues, including borders disputed between Arabs and Kurds and the power of the federal government in a country still haunted by decades of dictatorship.

The results set off political turmoil and opened a period of maneuvering expected to last months. Neither Mr. Allawi nor Mr. Maliki can reach the 163 votes in parliament needed to be named prime minister without forming an alliance with another bloc.

Mr. Maliki reacted angrily to the results, charging fraud and demanding a recount, although international observers pronounced the voting relatively fair. Mr. Maliki also persuaded the Supreme Court to issue a ruling that makes it more likely that he would be allowed to form a new government. And officials in charge of purging the government of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party said that they still expected to disqualify more than 50 political candidates, many of them members of Mr. Allawi's Iraqiya Party. That could strip Mr. Allawi of his plurality.

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